LHC

The Large Hadron Collider shut down last month for what is expected to be a two year period of upgrades and repair. Since the field of particle physics and the giant machines used to study it can be pretty complex, CERN released a short video explaining part of what will be going on in the LHC's downtime. Turns out that even though the LHC won't be operating, it's going to be a very busy place.

The scientific community got pretty excited with the discovery of a Higgs-like particle last year, but it turns out it's not all smiles and high fives. Apparently the Higgs boson was the missing piece in a subatomic calculation that could predict a Universe-ending catastrophic event in the future. How worried should you be? Depends on how many billions of years into the future you've made plans, but chances are pretty solid that you'll be long dead before this happens. So will the Earth. Smile! Everything ends!

A contingent of MIT researchers working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) think they've found something no one has ever seen in the depths of the reams of data provided by the LHC's particle smashups, and no, it's not the Higgs boson, because jeez, you guys, there's more to life than the Higgs boson, you know? By studying collision patterns in heavy metals, researchers think they may be seeing the first signs of a theorized state of matter known as color glass condensate, which could be the result of particles colliding at near-light speed entering a state of quantum entanglement, becoming inexplicably connected to one another.
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Well, this is strange. According to several news outlets, a video was accidentally posted to the CERN website and featured an announcement that the Large Hadron Collider had indeed discovered a new particle. Now things get stranger: CERN's press office says that not only was this never meant to be posted online, but is one of many videos produced in anticipation of different outcomes.
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In order to celebrate the Large Hadron Collider's discovery of its first new particle, here's a LEGO model of the LHC's Atlas experiment. Of course, there's a whole lot more to the LHC than just Atlas, but no one has gotten around to making the whole thing. Yet. For now, we'll just have to marvel at LEGO Atlas and see what it can discover. Maybe the stud isn't the smallest unit of LEGO matter after all.

The Large Hadron Collider, one of the key tools being used in the search for the Higgs Boson, has found its first new particle since being put into operation back in 2009. No, it's not the Higgs boson. The new particle is Chi_b (3P), a more excited state of the Chi particles we already knew existed. New kid on the block Chi_b (3P) should help researchers develop a more complete understanding of the strong nuclear force and to fill in the holes in the Standard Model in general; there are still a lot of holes in the Standard Model.

After decades as the workhorse of particle physics in America, the venerable Tevatron shuts down today. While the high costs of maintaining the structure are cited as the primary reason for the closure, the rising star of the Large Hadron Collider no doubt played some role in the Tevatron's demise.
The 3.9 mile long particle smasher was completed in 1983 for the breathtaking cost of $120 million. Built in rural Illinois as part of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Tevatron was at one point the highest-energy particle collider in the world. During its decades of operation, the Tevatron has confirmed the existence of the Top Quark, discovered a new particle called the "bottom Omega baryon," and even partook in the chase for the elusive Higgs boson. Though the main structure of the accelerator may be used in future experiments, and there are reams of data yet to go over, the Tevatron ended its scientific life today at 2 P.M..
Farewell, Tevatron. We'll spill some for you tonight.
(via Wired)
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Discovery News totally called this one: It turns out that all of those rumors that the elusive Higgs Boson had been discovered by Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator aren't true.

Last week, a physicist and blogger at the University of Padua, Tommaso Dorigo, wrote that "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result." Like a uranium-235 chain reaction, Dorigo's words exploded through the blogosphere and into the mainstream media, which inexplicably turned the rumored discovery into the latest in a nonexistent 'rivalry' between Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider.

Fermilab has laid the smackdown on the Higgs Boson discovery rumors, saying that they have "no merit" and are "just rumors." Fermilab has also taken a few digs at bloggers in the process:

It didn't fail, and it didn't end the world: Early this morning, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland successfully ran a major, highly anticipated experiment, sustaining a 7 TeV particle beam [that is, 7 trillion electric volts] and colliding protons at three times the previous record energy level.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be feared by many to be the eventual end of the world, but if it is, the emphasis is on "eventual": it just seems to keep getting delayed or shut down. First, it was the cooling system, then there was a problem with the superconducting magnets, then a bird (possibly from the future?) caused a serious overheating problem by dropping a piece of baguette into a thermal vent.
Now comes the announcement that the LHC will shut down yet again by the end of 2011: this time, because of design and safety problems brought about by mistakes made during its construction.
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